Major Meltdown for Hottest Planet: Even Molecules Are Torn to Shreds
In the scorching atmosphere of exoplanet KELT-9b, even molecules are torn to shreds. Massive gas giants called “hot Jupiters” — planets that orbit too close…
Spitzer Space Telescope
Earth-Size Habitable-Zone World Found by NASA Planet Hunter [Video]
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered its first Earth-size planet in its star’s habitable zone, the range of distances where conditions may be…
Astronomers Build Incredible 3D Visualization of Exploded Star Using NASA’s Great Observatories [Video]
Movie Dissects the Nebula’s Intricate Nested Structure In the year 1054 AD, Chinese sky watchers witnessed the sudden appearance of a “new star” in the…
Evolving Mystery of Stellar Evolution Explored in Perseus Molecular Cloud
This image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Perseus Molecular Cloud, a massive collection of gas and dust that stretches over 500 light-years across….
Jack-o-Lantern Nebula Spotted by Spitzer Telescope
A carved-out cloud of gas and dust looks like a celestial jack-o’-lantern in this image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. A massive star — known…
Starry Region Bursting With Bubbles and Bow Shocks Spotted by Spitzer
This infrared image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows a cloud of gas and dust full of bubbles, which are inflated by wind and radiation…
Sixteen Incredible Images for Spitzer’s Sweet 16
NASA launched its Spitzer Space Telescope into orbit around the Sun on Aug. 25, 2003. Since then, the observatory has been lifting the veil on…
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope Gets a Rare Look at the Surface of a Rocky Exoplanet
A new study using data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope provides a rare glimpse of conditions on the surface of a rocky planet orbiting a…
Perfectly Sideways Galaxy Spied by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope
This image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope might look like a lightsaber floating in space, but it’s actually an entire galaxy viewed on its side….
Hubble and Spitzer Identify the Atmosphere of Mid-Size Planet
Two NASA space telescopes have teamed up to identify, for the first time, the detailed chemical “fingerprint” of a planet between the sizes of Earth…
Spitzer Space Telescope Captures Amazing Stellar Family Portrait
In this large celestial mosaic taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, there’s a lot to see, including multiple clusters of stars born from the same…
Spitzer Reveals Clues to How Ancient Galaxies Lit up the Universe
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed that some of the universe’s earliest galaxies were brighter than expected. The excess light is a byproduct of the…
Astronomers View Star Formation in the Central Molecular Zone
Stars form from the gas and dust in molecular clouds via a series of complex processes that are currently only partly understood, and the evolution…
Astronomers Discover Brown Dwarf Binary Star with Microlensing
Brown dwarfs are stars less massive than the sun and unable to burn hydrogen. They comprise (at least in mass) a bridge between planets and…
Spitzer Images Show Galaxies on the Cusp of Cosmic Collisions
Three images from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope show pairs of galaxies on the cusp of cosmic consolidations. Though the galaxies appear separate now, gravity is…
Spitzer Reveals That Silica is Formed When Massive Stars Explode
We are all, quite literally, made of star dust. Many of the chemicals that compose our planet and our bodies were formed directly by stars….
Spitzer Views Newborn Stars Blowing Bubbles in the Cat’s Paw Nebula
This image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Cat’s Paw Nebula, so named for the large, round features that create the impression of a…
Chandra Detects Diskless Young Stars in Serpens South Cluster
Stars frequently form in crowded environments. By combining the resources of multi-wavelength missions like Chandra in the X-ray and Spitzer in the infrared, astronomers are…